This deserves many more upvotes than you’ve had. I guess most people here just don’t get the reference.
This deserves many more upvotes than you’ve had. I guess most people here just don’t get the reference.
No, not off the top of my head. But English is roughly half French/Latin and half German, with some Norse and other influences thrown in. Wer or were sound Germanic, so then a little Wikipedia help filled in the details.
Yes, this is interesting! ‘Wer’ (meaning ‘man’) came from Old High German with the Anglo Saxons 1,500 years ago, and was part of Old English. It then became ‘were’ in Middle English and remains as part of werewolf (‘man wolf’) in modern English.
Oh yes. It seemed like science fiction at the time, and when my office upgraded to a fax machine which printed on plain paper rather than the heat-sensitive stuff on a roll, that was actually pretty exciting. We still had Telex at the time, and it was only a few years since the inland telegram service had ended (you could still send them internationally).
There is a history of inclusive radio in the UK which goes back at least to the 1960s. Anyone who was born here and is over the age of about 50 will know about Kenneth Williams, who appeared in radio comedies with Hugh Paddick. The material is dated and may be regarded as clichéd and demeaning now, but they played two gay men called Julian and Sandy on a show called Round the Horne from 1965 to 1968, and the same characters came up in later shows as well. Bear in mind this was on national radio at a time when gay sex was still illegal in the UK. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_and_Sandy for more details.
WFMU (a radio station in New Jersey) has a weekly show on one of its web streams. It’s called Continental Subway, presented by an American called David Dichelle, who lives in Germany.
He plays all kinds of music in many different languages, as well as different versions of folk songs in English - he’s working through the Roud Folksong Index and has reached Roud 350, The Topman and the Afterguard / The Sailor and the Soldier. However, most of what he plays isn’t in English and as well as music from many different countries each week he will play 8 or 10 songs from a particular country chosen at random. This week it was Chad.
Very highly recommended, not least because all the shows back to 2017 are archived, so you can listen again when you want, and it’s listener supported so there are no adverts. Links to all the shows and playlists here: https://wfmu.org/playlists/CW